To be Present is to Be Authentic

Even if life had the purpose to teach us something, what it would teach us would be to live in the moment, where all is one. The best way to do that would be to take everything away from us when we die, even to make us forget everything, and to pass on what we've learned only in what we'd become next. Thus, whether there is an afterlife or not, we must assume that the only time we have to apply what we've learned is the same life in which we learned it.
To many of this seems straightforward, but why then do we take pride in what we learn, if no matter what, whether there are gods or not, we will forget it again anyway? Everything we are or have is but a tool, picked up now and dropped later. We don't progress, we merely move — we don't grow, we merely transform, and for everything we learn we lose something else of ourselves, because that's just the progression of time: one moment comes, another goes.
The only thing that changes is how close we are to the current — and with that I don't mean what's around us now, but what's currently being processed in our brain… and that's everything we are! So that means closer to ourselves: to be present is just to be authentic. And that's how existentialism and zen arrive at the same point from a different angle, one coming from the idealist east, one from the materialist west.
We become divine when we let the divinity of nature shine through us, as through a mirror, or lens, like the eye.